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The inconvenient little mess in our big backyard

More than half the Earth's population are city dwellers and one in six of those live in slums. Glenda Bartosh looks for lessons learned from the World Urban Forum held last month in Vancouver to apply to the challenges this paradigm shift presents.

Ten years ago, Olympian Steve Podborski was asked to define the single most important issue affecting Whistler. Depending on where the needle sits on your cynic-meter, it’s both surprising and not that his answer remains cogent and pressing today, times about a billion: the transition from a growing community to a sustainable community and the issues that go along with it.

As the UN-Habitat World Urban Forum in Vancouver recently demonstrated, if we weren’t too cynical to listen, not only is it easy to extrapolate and build on that idea, it’s impossible not to.

I know, it’s hard, really, really hard to think about these things – especially, as Dr. David Suzuki points out, our brains are hard-wired to not consider a single slender soul beyond our own little tribe, one that shrinks by the digital day to me, my husband, little Alice or Alistair and mom and dad.

But the evidence is splayed at our feet in a messy, compelling array that’s hypnotic and, I venture, too scary to ignore.

Let me pick through a bit of it for you.

The weekly city on the daily planet

Last year, the planet reached a tipping point.

Now, I warned you – this is hard to think about, especially if you’re a born-and-bred Canadian anywhere between the age of, say, 16 and 76. For if you are, you’ve grown up looking at a globe or pastel-coloured map of our friendly little planet through a post-colonial Canadian world view that goes something like this: Hmmm, here’s a big blank country, which we invariably interchange with our Canadiana notion of "country", meaning wild open spaces interspersed with people living on nice little farms and ranches or in towns with names like 100 Mile House and Tofield.

Over here’s a dot for a city, and that means quite a few more people, living in relatively tidy and reasonable enclaves, with some high-rises and shops and scads of comfortable big homes, like Saskatoon or Vancouver. And on we go.

But in 2005 something happened that flips this wrong-headed notion on its ear.

For the first time, more than half the people on Earth were living in cities. That’s three billion of the whopping six billion people on our planet. And in 2005, for the first time, the number of people living in slums, which most of us in our comfortable homes can barely imagine, crossed the one billion mark. That’s one person in six living in a slum.

With war and lawlessness battering countrysides, global warming squeezing the life out of arable land, and the simple human hope for a better life, people all over the world, especially the developing world, are flocking to cities.

The crush is only going to grow.

A speech World Bank’s Katherine Sierra delivered at the recent World Urban Forum contained some boggling scenarios. Over the next 30 years, the urban population of developing countries will double, from approximately 2 billion today to over 4 billion. At the same time, the developed world’s urban population will rise, too, but only by about 11 per cent.

That means the magnitude of urban population growth that developing countries are facing is about 10 times that of the developed world.

And to completely put the lie to our Canadianized world view, cities in the developing world will spread out to occupy about three times their present land area. Along with that will spread the incumbent slums and poverty.

Keep in mind that some of these cities are already like little countries. Mexico City, 18-20 million people, and about 1,500 sq. km., half the area of Belgium; São Paulo, Brazil, 17 million people, 2,100 sq. km.; Mumbai, India, 16 million people – little countries with sprawling slums, where kids swim through garbage in stinking canals and 1,300 people will share a six-hole latrine as their only toilet. In slums too dangerous to venture out in at night, "flying toilets" are the sanitation system of choice – you urinate or defecate into a plastic bag, tie it up and fling it out the window as far as you can.

As these 2 billion new urban inhabitants move into cities, they’ll need the equivalent of planning, financing, and servicing facilities for a new city of 1 million people every week for the next 30 years. That’s a "weekly" city about the size of Vancouver.

"However, these will not be nicely planned, new cities at all," Sierra warns. "But rather, without smart interventions, the unplanned and unrecorded expansion of existing slum settlements – poorly located, with un-serviced new ghettoes, often on the urban periphery.

"Poverty will deepen and despair will grow."

And that’s just the human side of the catastrophe.

Whether you ascribe to the Buckminster Fuller notion of Spaceship Earth, the pure science of ecosystems, or the "butterfly effect" (if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, it will set off a tornado in Texas), it’s pretty easy to see that well beyond the immediate ground zeroes, this whole scenario, with its fouled air and water, resource and human degradation, and security and economic issues, has the ripe potential to sink us all.

Grokking sustainability

Facing such massive, massive problems, where do we begin? In our own backyard, which, depending on your worldview, ends at your fence line, at the Whistler municipal boundary, or somewhere in deep space.

How do we do it? Sustainable practices.

But sustainability is a term we hear so much these days, some would argue – especially those Whistlerites who turned off the whole Whistler 2020 exercise (the community’s comprehensive sustainability plan) some time in the last four years – that it’s lost all meaning. Or, if it has meaning, it’s about as relevant as calculus.

But let’s deconstruct that for a minute.

To begin with, Charles Kelly, commissioner general for the World Urban Forum, figures that 85 per cent of journalists just don’t get sustainability, never mind the general public that’s their audience.

"They (journalists) think it’s a piece of political rhetoric," said Kelly in a post-forum interview. "The words don’t make any sense to them. They don’t think about it, so they don’t have a context for it.

"The problem is that at some level as things get bandied around by special interest groups or politicians… it becomes a form of rhetoric."

The bottom line – and I warned you – it’s hard to grok sustainability in a truly meaningful way even though we’ve had more than a little practice over the last 40 years. You have to really, really think about it, partly because we’re defying evolution and our brain’s hard-wiring to do so.

The nub of the sustainable worldview goes back to the environmental movement of the 1960s and the thinking of people like Rachel Carson ( Silent Spring ), Buckminster Fuller ( Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth ) and Paul Ehrlich ( The Population Bomb ).

But it was the Brundtland Report of 1987 (also called Our Common Future ) that swept the first sticks of sustainability together, recognizing that we can’t separate environmental issues from economic ones. It also stressed that real global equity – ergo security – means redistributing resources to poorer nations while encouraging their economic growth.

As sustainability was applied as an operating principle from the late ’80s on, the social component was added. That meant including people and their concerns, along with the environment and the economy, in our decision-making, and involving them in the process.

"And that’s where the rubber hits the road, from an operating management point of view," says Kelly.

"That’s why it matters so much if communities at a civic level, where infrastructure decisions get made and where regulations get made with respect to building codes or transportations corridors and all of those things – that’s why it’s so critical that cities apply these (principles) in a significant and ongoing way."

This was a key takeaway at the World Urban Forum. Unlike the thinking in the ’60s and ’70s when the environmental movement first blossomed and people focused on central governments as the main power brokers, everybody now recognizes that when it comes to building sustainable communities and a sustainable world, the agents for real change are those closest to the ground.

In terms of government, that means our mayors and councillors. In terms of people, that means the kinds of activists and doers who flocked to the World Urban Forum, as well as – ultimately, hopefully – us.

For if the average Joe or Jane groks the concept and gets behind sustainability in all its myriad facets, it builds political will and consensus to act at home and abroad.

As Kelly points out, in a place like this, in fact in most of North America and Europe, we don’t tend to focus our attention on the problems of a place like Mumbai. Even when Mumbai makes 72-point headlines because of terrorist bombings that kill hundreds of people, the problems of the 60 per cent of Mumbaians living in slums have no context, no meaning, no relevance for us.

For them to do so, we need to see them in two ways, he says.

"You need to look at it at the big picture level – what’s the scale of the problems we are trying to address and what the consequences are. But then you also have to look at the micro-level because some of the solutions that make a difference are at the level of a few streets and a few communities and how you address these things."

Something like the people of Squamish putting their money where their beliefs are and building a school, a hospital and 200 homes in Wanduruppa, Sri Lanka, brick by brick by brick.

So even though it might seem like calculus, don’t give up on Whistler 2020 and sustainability – at least not yet. If we can untangle the real from the rhetoric and the three-volume 2020 document, we’re on the right track.

The table’s been set; billions of opportunities are before us. It’s up to us to belly up and do something.



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